In Gaza’s collapsing health system, deaths are slow, painful and often preventable

Gaza's hospitals are on the brink of collapsing, and people are dying preventable deaths from simple injuries and chronic diseases

After a 10-year-old girl was injured in a bombing in Rafah, she was brought to Dr. Nour El-Din Khaled Al-Amassi at Al-Najjar Hospital, bleeding from a head wound 4 inches deep, her pulse dropping rapidly.

In a functioning hospital, stabilizing her would have taken three minutes, Al-Amassi said. In Gaza, she died within 10 minutes. 

Al-Amassi needed to maintain her pulse and administer intravenous solutions to prepare her for an operation. But there was no anesthesia, no adrenaline and no atropine to support her heart function. 

He would have needed two more doctors, two nurses, an anaesthesiologist and a neurosurgeon, but the staff at his hospital, like others in Gaza, have fled — driven away by gunfire, airstrikes, collapsing buildings — and those who remain are stretched thin, struggling to care for the unceasing flow of wounded crowded onto the hospital’s floors and in its operating rooms. 

The deprivations that prevented Al-Amassi from saving the girl cut across Gaza’s remaining hospitals. More than three months of relentless shelling and fighting has pushed Gaza’s hospitals to the brink of collapse, creating a spiraling crisis of preventable deaths and permanent injury that is piling tragedy on top of the war’s skyrocketing death toll, currently over 24,000, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/gaza-hospitals-collapsing-rcna132439

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